Spherical near-field (NF) scanning has become a key element in antenna engineering practice. Maturing from its research beginnings in the 1970's to the wide variety of applications found today, it represents a fundamental approach to determination of performance for almost all types of antennas. Nevertheless a full understanding of the theoretical basis and the principles of measurement practice is held by only some in the antenna engineering community. The reason for this is that commercial software alleviates the need for a knowledge of the underlying theory on the part of technicians operating an antenna range. This course offers participants an opportunity to appreciate the relationship between fundamental knowledge and its application in the practice of antenna measurement. Furthermore, over the past five years additional aspects of spherical near-field scanning measurements have afforded the addition of holographic back-projection and spherical modal filtering. A review of these more recently developed methods will provide the participant with knowledge that is up-to-date with current practice.

Current designs of electromagnetic cloaks are largely based on the use of metamaterials and on a technique called "transformation optics/electromagnetics." Free space cloaks require materials with extreme properties and, hence, they are difficult to implement in practice. However, the theory of "transformation optics/electromagnetics" offers a useful design tool for antenna engineers, and enables them to develop novel antennas. In this course, the concepts of transformation electromagnetics are introduced first, and later applied to the design of antennas and microwave devices such as flat reflectors, lenses and electrically small antennas. Novel FDTD techniques to deal with the design of gradient index metamaterials will be also demonstrated. In addition to the above, a novel design strategy based on field transformationtechnique will also be included in the presentation.

In the past years integration density of antennas and circuits in microwave multilayer modules reached a new level. Such integration density requires accurate full wave EM simulation techniques to create a reliable design within one or few design cycles. Due to the tremendous increase in PC hardware development and due to the enhancements of the software codes it is now possible to simulate complex antennas and large structures within short time. This short course aims on preparing the participants to use state-of-the-art numerical EM software tools for the efficient design of antennas and multilayer modules. The course consists of lectures and interactive practical EM design work.

This short course will provide the participants with a comprehensive overview of electronically scanned reflectarrays technology. The principal aspects linked to reconfigurable reflectarray technology will be covered by the relevant experts, including fundamental theory, design of reflectarray systems, reconfigurable reflective unit cells, the lens array variant, and the applications of electronically scanned reflectarray. The course material is intended to novice as well as more experienced students or professionals interested in reconfigurable reflectarray technology and related topics.

This course is of interest for the practicing engineer, as well as for people engaged in research within wireless communication systems. Due to the fact that coverage/capacity relations will be deeply analyzed, a holistic approach from RF up to system level will be given. This way, from the antenna engineer, to radiopropagation all the way to system engineers will find interest in the topic of the course. The aim of this course is to explain the procedures and tools required for the planning and further optimization of high speed 3.5G, 3.75G and future LTE mobile networks. Coverage-capacity relations are described, related to radio channel characteristics as well as to system level considerations. Link simulation as well as system level simulation techniques are described in order to fulfill a realistic planning and optimization procedure. The issues related tohigh capacity femtocell environments will be described in order to achieve the optimal performance in a heterogeneous network topology.

The course is devoted typically for microwave and mm wave link (terrestrial as well as satellite) designers, FSO link designers, propagation specialists and engineers, physicists, radio-climatologists, teachers. The attendants should receive an overview of propagation phenomena in the atmosphere for both radio and optical signals with respect to the wave propagation modelling. They will be able to predict the atmospheric attenuation from meteorological parameters; they also receive algorithms enabling this. The most important phenomena, such as rain, cloud, water vapour, fog and wind will be emphasized.

Contact:Ondrej FiserInstitute of Atmospheric Physics of the Czech Academyondrej@ufa.cas.cz

With LTE already deployed in some cities by the end of 2010 and the compulsory use of MIMO into 3.9G standards (IEEE802.11n, HSPA+, WiMAX and LTE), MIMO technology has finally exploded. Mobile Internet Peripherals and Devices are said to take a market share of 30% of all handsets and non-handsets wireless devices by 2013. In this complex scenario, antenna engineering has gained a tremendous importance. The antenna engineer is condemned to learn all these new parameters if he/she can face 4G designs successfully. In this short course, these new antenna parameters will be described in detail. The basics of MIMO testing will be explained from the antenna engineering point of view. The concepts will be reviewed by case studies used in some MIMO testing tools. Both passive and active antenna testing parameters of standardized bodies and round robin results between labs worldwide will be presented and analyzed. The different methodologies for testing which have been approved by standardized bodies (3GPP/CTIA) will be reviewed and compared. The course is an ideal getting started document for antenna engineers that are first faced with the novel MIMO testing tools for antennas, which will become a must for any 4G antenna technology onwards. Likewise, it represents an update of the latest figures of merit and measurement techniques for those antenna engineers already keen on MIMO.

The ABC of small antennas

This short course addresses young engineering scientists with a research interest in antennas as well as advanced antenna engineers. The short course includes both tutorial sections and presentations of latest results in antenna research and development. This short course covers these urgent topics in a comprehensive way through selected and aligned contributions from European experts. Individual radiating elements and array aspects are addressed as well as issues of design and modeling, implementation, characterisation, and application, both for electrically and physically small antennas. The attendees will be given a unique opportunity to widen their scientific background knowledge and join a lively exchange and discussion of latest developments in this specific and increasingly impor-tant field.

Recently, interest in dielectric resonator antennas has increased because of their attractive features such as small size, high radiation efficiency (98%), wide bandwidth, and high power capability for radar applications and base stations. The dielectric resonator antenna is made from high dielectric constant materials and mounted on a ground plane or on a grounded dielectric substrate of lower permittivity. The short course will start by a short overview for the development of the dielectric resonator antennas. The theory of operation will be discussed step by step to provide basic understanding. The discussion is provided in simple forms to satisfy audience of different background levels. Design curves will be provided for the circular disc and hemisphere dielectric resonators. Use of these models with other geometries is discussed.

This short course details non-conformal domain decomposition methods for solving large electromagnetic problems such as large finite antenna arrays, frequency selective surfaces (FSS), metamaterials, and EMC effects of antenna arrays on large platformsetc. With recent revolutionary breakthroughs, it is now possible to solve electromagnetic problems with hundreds or even billions of finite and boundary element unknowns on simple PCs without compromise of the solution accuracy. Topics included in this short course are: Non-conformal DDMs for repetitive structures, Non-conformal DDMs for Method of Moment, Multi-region/Multi-solver DDMs.